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We come, so, to the question whether Purification is the whole
of this human quality, virtue, or merely the forerunner upon
which virtue follows? Does virtue imply the achieved state of
purification or does the mere process suffice to it, Virtue being
something of less perfection than the accomplished pureness which
is almost the Term?
To have been purified is to have cleansed away everything alien:
but Goodness is something more.
If before the impurity entered there was Goodness, the Goodness
suffices; but even so, not the act of cleansing but the cleansed
thing that emerges will be The Good. And it remains to establish
what this emergent is.
It can scarcely prove to be The Good: The Absolute Good cannot be
thought to have taken up its abode with Evil. We can think of it
only as something of the nature of good but paying a double
allegiance and unable to rest in the Authentic Good.
The Soul's true Good is in devotion to the
Intellectual-Principle, its kin; evil to the Soul lies in
frequenting strangers. There is no other way for it than to
purify itself and so enter into relation with its own; the new
phase begins by a new orientation.
After the Purification, then, there is still this orientation to
be made? No: by the purification the true alignment stands
accomplished.
The Soul's virtue, then, is this alignment? No: it is what the
alignment brings about within.
And this is...?
That it sees; that, like sight affected by the thing seen, the
soul admits the imprint, graven upon it and working within it, of
the vision it has come to.
But was not the Soul possessed of all this always, or had it
forgotten?
What it now sees, it certainly always possessed, but as lying
away in the dark, not as acting within it: to dispel the
darkness, and thus come to knowledge of its inner content, it
must thrust towards the light.
Besides, it possessed not the originals but images, pictures; and
these it must bring into closer accord with the verities they
represent. And, further, if the Intellectual-Principle is said to
be a possession of the Soul, this is only in the sense that It is
not alien and that the link becomes very close when the Soul's
sight is turned towards It: otherwise, ever-present though It be,
It remains foreign, just as our knowledge, if it does not
determine action, is dead to us.
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